The present invention provides an apparatus for cleaning the record/playback head of a cassette drive device such as a magnetic tape drive device, the apparatus having a casing in the form of a cassette which may be inserted into the cassette drive device.
The invention is particularly concerned with streamer tape drives, as used for back-up purposes in computer installations. U.S. Pat. No. 4,631,614 discloses in FIG. 6 a cleaner for the heads of a streamer tape drive in which a complex drive train transmits drive to a rocking cleaning head which wipes a pad across the heads in a direction transverse to the direction of tape movement (or the longitudinal extent of the tape). Other head cleaning proposals include European Patent Application No. 0 188 655 which is a purely manual streamer tape drive head cleaning system, and U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,442,468; 4,149,206 and 3,955,214 which describe cleaners for audio tape cassette drives of well-known type in which a cleaning means is driven from the usual sprocket or hub of the cassette. We have found that none of these systems are satisfactory for streamer tape drives in providing sufficient cleaning action without causing undue wear on the heads.